A reduction in appetite to fund European social programs under our security umbrella is not the same as being "allied" with Russia. They're big boys and girls and coming on a hundred years after their disastrous warring, it's about time their federated economy step in/up. Can the alliance not survive without our patronage?
1. It's not like America didn't benefit from the arrangement.
2. While it's fun to kill geese laying golden eggs, the question Americans should really ask is what awaits them on the other side of their actions, and whether the upcoming arrangement is really going to benefit them more.
Yeah, peak experience for me was when our town had both a Borders and B&N offering huge tech book sections. Then Borders closed. Then B&N became a toy store.
Table with a thread-safe read-through cache in code, imo. But there are places where enums make sense. For instance, things that are specifically in the code's domain.
I think the idea is that the Ubiquiti equipment is far more capable than normal consumer-grade equipment like ASUS, and still manages to "just work". So your ASUS may also "just work" but is has a fraction of the capabilities as the unifi system in terms of feature load-out and scope of native device integrations.
I believe there are more slaves today than ever in the history of the planet simply due to population growth. While everyone WE know thinks slavery is morally evil, most of the world does not hold that view. In fact, I would say the default human view (looking at all cultures across time memorial) is that slavery is the rule not the exception. That doesn't go away with modernity, it goes away with culture.
There’s also a significant conversation about mere illegality and social rejection not actually doing much to address the underlying tendency to exploitation that (a) has prevented reconciliation and relief for formerly enslaved people and their descendants for more than a century and (b) is woven through the labor model common even in the West. Exploited paid laborers aren’t in the same category as enslaved persons, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that economic injustice has been meaningfully addressed.
To make room for slavery mentally you have to believe that some people are subhuman or at least beneath the threshold for human rights.
What's surprising to me is that it's become more common to describe people you dislike as subhuman and to for people to support violence or cruelty toward them. Similarly there is a trend to see hatred and anger as positive goods.
I would avoid analogizing this to the petty political fads of the west. Actual human slavery is still a very real thing in much of the world. Slavery is likely less about making mental room so much as being raised in an environment where it’s normalized. In other words, the mental room was allocated in the new construction of the world view more often than remodeled.
“ Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
If you spend pretty much all waking hours dedicated to some task you don't care about entirely to avoid dire consequences I'd say you are close enough. People might still want to use a different word to describe the same thing but it requires they care more about appearance than substance.
And I think you underestimate the reality of actual slavery.
There is nothing remotely comparable between slavery and a modern job. Feel free to make a more substantial argument as to how they are than "it's close enough"
You underestimate the reality of some "modern jobs" out there. There are garment workers in Bangladesh locked inside factories so we can enjoy cheap clothing. There are miners in the Congo working under militia control. There are migrant laborers in Gulf states with their passports seized, forced to work 12 hour shifts every day.
Some modern jobs absolutely contain elements of coercion, abuse, and exploitation that are comparable to forms of slavery.
I think you are just refusing to acknowledge that we really haven't improved all that much as a society. It's easy to define slavery in a way that you can say we got rid of it so you can pat yourself on the back for being enlightened and then proceed to not care about any working conditions close to it. Fact is that many people are forced to do jobs that no one would want to do.
This seems like a fruitless back and forth. To discuss modern slavery, specifically, we need to be clear that we're not talking about the hyperbolic characterization of low-wage or even to some degree exploited labor. Exploited labor (broad term) != literal slave labor (specific). At the same time, we need to understand that many workers around the world do not have the option to leave, even if they are compensated. To merely call this exploited labor can belie the fact that it is adjacent to if not identical to slave labor.
Be that as it may, "exploited labor" is too broad a term without qualifiers to be using it synonymously with slavery. A foreign-national on an H1-B visa in the US working in an IT body shop can be exploited labor (we all have stories), but nobody in their right mind would equate that with slavery. This example is just to illustrate how broad the "exploited labor" label is. Many people are not aware that modern day slavery exists, so it's important to be very clear that by narrowing the terms we use. It doesn't mean we shouldn't care about exploited labor, just a call to respect the nuance in language.
In this context, because the environmental activists don't want an end to their lifestyle products or especially the pillars of modern civilization (plastic, concrete, fertilizer, steel), they just want the costs to be borne by poorer countries, which in turn have less responsible resource extraction regulations than the developed world, which is WORSE for the environment on net.
The environmental activists aren't arguing for responsible resource extraction at home, they effectuate the ban of resource extraction at home, and only at home.
The global appetite for energy and resources doesn't recede because you choose not to mine, the mining is just done elsewhere. In China, in the Congo, etc.
True concern for the environment would mean that each consumer (at least the largest ones) should be stewarding their own extraction requirements. The endless lawsuits, protests, and rhetoric often make onshoring impossible.
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